He Lover of Death Read Free Page B

– after all, he’d never stolen openly like that before. And what if he got caught? They’d kick him so hard, it would make Uncle Zot seem like a doting mother.
    He wandered round the market, keeping well away from Solyanka Street. He knew that over there, behind that street, was Khitrovka, the most terrible place in all Moscow. Of course, there were plenty of con merchants and pickpockets in Sukharevka too, but they were no match for the thieves of Khitrovka. From what he’d heard, it was a terrifying place. Stick your nose in there, and they’d have you stripped naked before you could say knife, and you could be grateful if you managed to escape with your life. The flophouses there were really frightening, with lots of cellars and underground vaults. And there were runaway convicts there, and murderers, and all sorts of drunken riff-raff. And they said that if any youngsters happened to wander in there, they disappeared without a trace. They had some special kind of crooks there, grabbers, they were called, or so people said. And these grabbers caught young boys who had no one to look out for them and sold them for five roubles apiece to the Yids and the Tartars for depraved lechery in their secret houses.
    But as it turned out that was all horseshit. Well, everything about the flophouses and the drunken riff-raff was true, but there weren’t any grabbers in Khitrovka. When Senka let slip about the grabbers to his new mates, they laughed him down something rotten. Prokha said that if someone wanted to grab a bit of easy money off kids, that was fine, but forcing youngsters into doing filthy things – that just wasn’t on. The Council wouldn’t stand for anything like that. Slitting a throat or two in the middle of the night wasn’t a problem, if some gull showed up because he was drunk or just plain stupid. They’d found someone in Podkopaevsky Lane just recently, head smashed in like a soft-boiled egg, fingers cut off to get the rings, and his eyes gouged out. It was his own fault. You shouldn’t go sticking your nose in where you aren’t invited. The mice shouldn’t play where the cats are waiting.
    ‘Only why put his eyes out?’ Senka asked in fright.
    But Mikheika the Night-Owl just laughed and said: ‘Go and ask them as put them out.’
    But that conversation came later, when Senka was already a Khitrovkan.
    It all happened very quickly and simply – before he even had time to sneeze, you might say.
    There was Senka walking along the row of spiced tea stalls, sizing up what there was to filch and plucking up his courage, and suddenly this almighty ruckus started up, with people shouting on all sides, and this woman was yelling. ‘Help! I’ve been robbed, they’ve took me purse, stop thief!’ And two young lads, about the same age as Senka, came dashing along the line of stalls, kicking up the bowls and mugs as they ran. A woman selling spiced tea grabbed one of them by the belt with a great ham of a hand and pulled him down on to the ground. ‘Gotcha,’ she shouted, ‘you vicious little brute! Now you’re for it!’ But the other young thief, with a sharp pointy nose, leapt off a hawker’s stand and thumped the woman on the ear. She went all limp and slipped over on her side (Prokha always carried a lead bar with him, Senka learnt that later). The lad with the pointy nose jerked the other one up by the arm to get him to keep on running, but people had already closed in from all sides. They’d probably have beaten the two of them to death for hurting the woman, if it wasn’t for Senka.
    He roared at the top of his voice:
    ‘Good Orthodox people! Who dropped a silver rouble?’
    Well, they all went dashing over to him: ‘I did, I did!’ But he squeezed through between their outstretched hands and shouted to the young thieves:
    ‘Don’t stand there gawping! Leg it!’
    They sprinted after him, and when Senka hesitated at a gateway, they overtook him and waved for him to follow.
    After